Coping with a Lawyer's Job

When you're quite finished with laying out your master plan from the lofty heights, you'll find everyone else impatiently waiting for you to climb down into the trenches and start struggling like the common, dogface attorney you are. That means that you have to do the work and deal with the people. This enterprise may lack grandness, but it's your job.

A. The Work: Pushing Paper

In this country, you have all kinds of attorneys and law-related tasks. And an awful lot of those tasks are basically paper-pushing.

If you haven't worked with lawyers, it can be difficult to understand how they can spend so much time playing around with paperwork. Our country's attorneys collectively spend well over a billion hours a year on this stuff. You have to figure that it must be pretty complicated. And it is.

For example, let's suppose that Joe Blow, John Doe, and Jill Snow signed a NewCo resolution on April 1, 1991, in which they claimed to be directors and agreed that NewCo should issue new shares of stock. And let's suppose that the people who bought that stock eventually voted, as shareholders, to permit NewCo to enter into this deal with my client.

Sounds OK, right? But what if Joe & John & Jill had not been properly voted into office as NewCo directors before April 1, 1991? In that case, they would not have had the power to issue that additional stock, which could mean those shareholders wouldn't be legitimate, and maybe their vote wouldn't count, and maybe it would be illegal for NewCo to be entering into this deal with my client. These are things my client would want to know as soon as possible.

There are many other things like that to look for. It takes you a long time to look through all those corporate books and consider all the various angles.

Anyway, that's one example of how you can spend an awful lot of time digging through mountains of paper. It never ceased to amaze one, how work expands to fool the time allotted.

B. The People

A recent development at law firms is the hiring of nonlegal professionals (NLPs). Unlike paralegals, NLPs may cost as much as an attorney per hour but, by their specialized training, may handle the work more efficiently. Consider these words from a big firm's managing partner:

[A] quarter to a third of what many of our associates do ... can be done by a talented economist or MBA. We have just hired our first person like that. She is an economist in the international trade field. ... We compensate her like a young associate and she's got an office with a window. I wish we had 10 more like her.

Given the limits on lawyers' practical knowledge when they come out of law school - and for years thereafter - it's not surprising that law firms are showing a greater interest, not only in hiring more paralegals (whose numbers are expected to double in the next 10 years), but also in employing economists and lobbyists, among others, to increase the range of services they offer to clients.305 So if you'd like to get on the law firm bandwagon without having to become an attorney first, this is an angle to look into.

When you graduate from law school, you're lucky if you know where the courthouse is. Your practice will be filled with forms and documents you've never seen before and don't have the vaguest idea how to prepare. For these purposes, among many others, a legal secretary can be worm his/her weight in gold. With their assistance, you can get the job done without calling endless numbers of bureaucrats and plowing through mountains of books for the answers you need.

That's what secretaries do. But how about who they are? Wall Street is close to Brooklyn, so my secretaries tend to be from that borough, where rents are cheaper and where a lot of them may up. In 1636, Dutch settlers arrived at this piece of Long Island across the East River from Manhattan. They named the place after Breuckelen, in the Netherlands. Brooklyn grew. It became, in 1898, one of the five boroughs of New York City. Brooklyn, at one time, contained 2.3 million people, giving it more people than the cities of San Francisco, Boston, Denver, and Seattle combined. In population, Brooklyn, by itself, would be the fourth largest city in America, behind the rest of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Brooklyn has the broad parkways and the Promenade. It's the home of "Prizzi's Honor" and the original Mafia; of the disco in John Travolta's "Saturday Night Fever"; and of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs." When some American diplomats in Vietnam once tried to fool Ho Chi Minh, he asked them, in street-smart English, "What are you guys trying to pull?" He'd been a cook in Brooklyn. Babe Ruth ended his career in Brooklyn, as coach of the Dodgers. Rumor says that Barbra Streisand was in the same high school graduating class there as Neil Diamond, who sang "Brooklyn Roads" after he moved to California.

Despite the pressures and the occasional conflicts in the office, many have fun gossiping with the secretaries and paralegals, sometimes joining them instead of the attorneys for a drink after work, and commemorating the higher moments in their lives, such as when Daisy celebrated, would you believe, her sixtieth anniversary of working as a secretary at the firm. The secretaries, like Brooklyn, were a world unto themselves, and with my farmland-and-law-school cultural baggage, no one was ever really able to explore those worlds like they wish they could have.

The Chinese waiters remain this one class of person who have an important impact on the legal practice on Wall Street. You have to figure, if a guy orders Chinese food delivered to the same office twice a week for two years, and if he always orders the same thing, you'll get to know him, even if you're a cold-hearted Chinese waiter in the stone tombs of Wall Street. Right?

Wrong. Such is not everyone's luck. Pat, a lawyer, always phoned in an order for fried dumplings, hot & sour soup, and tea. The same guy - called Won Ton Lee - always took the order, and yet he did not have a clue who Pat was. He'd claim to have problems with Pat's credit card number. He'd forget the frigging tea. He'd refuse to deliver to Pat's office. Pat couldn't believe it. After a morning of stressful corporate negotiations Pat would look forward to a relaxing lunch; instead, he would get Lee, haggling with him in broken English about the notion of delivering a meal to 14 Wall Street. Pat would remind him that he had delivered the identical order to him two days earlier, and then he'd agree to do it, as though it were a special favor to me.

On his last day at the Wall Street firm, Pat ate a dozen fortune cookies that had accumulated around his desk, just for good luck. And then, sure enough, a few weeks after he left the firm, Pat's friends there told him that two well-dressed representatives of the Hunan Cuisine restaurant had made a personal visit to the firm, to find out what had happened to Woocok, the guy who used to order fried dumplings and soup twice a week.